Tag Archives: game

Manufactoria: a brain-expanding puzzle game

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I finally completed Manufactoria.

Manufactoria is an online puzzle game, which is deceptively simple and surprisingly deep. Your task is to build a factory machine from simple components which takes an object, inspects it and moves it around the factory floor accordingly. In later stages, you get to modify the object as well.

At first you think you’re just moving objects around and printing patterns of coloured dots on them, but later, when you’re thinking of blue dots as 1s and red dots as 0s, and the patterns as binary numbers, you realise that the system is Turing complete and the game’s progressively harder puzzles are teaching you how to build a binary adding machine. It’s a beautiful, powerful way to demonstrate the principles behind mechanical/electronic computation.

While some games, like Angry Birds and Candy Crush, are meant to numb your brain with repetitive tasks, the best ones expand your brain with new skills and knowledge: Manufactoria is in the latter class.

Play the game online here: Manufactoria at PleasingFungus Games

Board games for life skills: the bad and the good

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The following letter appeared in The Times on Saturday.

“Sir, I am saddened to hear a leading educationalist encourage computer games as a form of learning (“Angry Birds teaches pupils life skills, says schools chief”, May 6). I agree with everything Angela McFarlane says about games, but the same is true of Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo and Monopoly – with the advantage that the life skills are not a superficial coating on an aggressive, conflict-led platform and the interaction is social and face to face.

“Nor is there a marketing strategy to get our children addicted by rewarding them with a dopamine fix every six seconds (usually when they destroy something). This erodes their attention span and their ability to persevere and to learn the value of delayed gratification. Professor McFarlane says she became hooked, ironically, on a game called Lemmings. This is what marketers employ psychologists to do – to get our children hooked. I do not want our 6-year-old to be encouraged to use computer games to develop his life skills.

“Violence and death are trivialised in so many games and we may well ask whether acquiring superficial life skills justifies anaesthetising our children to death.

“I would encourage your readers to sit down with their teenage offspring and watch Beeban Kidron’s film In Real Life to get a more balanced view of the insidious nature of these seemingly innocent “games”.

“CAROLINE SILVER
London SW6″

While I don’t necessarily disagree with Caroline Silver’s cynicism about the addictive design mechanisms of computer games, and her scepticism about their educational value, and I enthusiastically second her championing of board games as an alternative, I do find it surprising that she chose to recommend Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo and Monopoly as her examples. As a self-admitted board game nerd, this suggests to me that Ms Silver doesn’t know much about board games.

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Understanding India for geeks

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I had a sudden epiphany last night and realised the best way to explain India to 30-something computer-gaming geeks.

You know that massive empire you acquired by military conquest in Civilization 3? And then converted to democracy, thinking it’d become an economic powerhouse? But you couldn’t achieve anything useful because every city was mired in 90% corruption? And the only reason you weren’t facing all-out revolt was because you had temples everywhere, keeping the populace distracted enough to stay quiet?

That’s what India’s like in real life.